A piece I wrote about the attorney general back in 1991 has been making the rounds. Here's why I wrote it, and why what I said is even truer now.
When William Barr was nominated by George Bush Sr. to be attorney general in 1991, I got a jolt of post-traumatic stress. The announcement flashed me back to personal victimization by Barr that I had not thought of for 25 years. Could it be, I wondered, that the sociopath from my childhood is really about to become the highest legal official in the land?
This ominous prospect compelled me to publicly share my experiences of being bullied by Barr. I wrote an account of being intimidated by Barr when he was two years ahead of me in both middle and high school (1963-1967) at Horace Mann in New York, and in college (1969-71) at Columbia University, where his violent behavior escalated.
I submitted these recollections to the Florida Flambeau, a small Tallahassee daily newspaper that mostly serves the Florida State University community. I secretly hoped Barr would never see it and was fairly confident he would not. In the Flambeau piece I outed Barr as a racist and a bully in high school.
He and a buddy of his made a habit of harassing me every time they saw me because I wore pro-civil rights buttons. They would team up and try to scare me, knock me out of the way when they went past me in the hallway and grumble about me being a pinko. I made it my business to avoid them.
Barr and his brothers were all known for their extreme right-wing views. One year they even picketed the Junior Carnival, an annual charity fundraiser, because the proceeds were going to the NAACP. When I got to college, I learned that Barr had earned a reputation there for teaming up with riot police to attack anti-war protesters and beat heads right alongside them.
In the article reporting on my years of dodging Barrs high school terror tactics, I included some research on what Barr had been up to in the intervening years. It was not a pretty picture: He was burnishing his right-wing credentials in the CIA, and in elite echelons of the legal world advocating for anti-abortion activists and lobbying for corporate welfare. That was 29 years ago.
Fast forward to December 2018 and he's baaaack. Of course, the notion of Barr now serving in a Trump administration had what little hair I have standing on end. So I scanned a clipping of the 1991 column and posted it on Facebook. Many months later, in early 2020, it took off on Twitter when Barr was back in the news for some atrocity that has since been obscured by others. Now my retrospective Barr profile has a resurgence every week or sowhenever Barr outdoes himself and reaches a new low.
The amazing thing about the 1991 columnand the reason it has garnered so much attention and interestis that long before Barrs current era of dastardliness, I totally nailed him for what he is today, although hes taken it to extremes far beyond my wildest imagination: a racist, a bully, and a fascist.
Barr is a lifelong racist. Why in the world would Barr target me for harassment and intimidation when I was a puny little 12-year-old, two years behind him whom he didnt even know? The answer is very simple: I wore racial equality buttons. One was a very beautiful and meaningful button distributed by the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), a prominent youth civil rights organization at the time. It was a small black button with a white equal sign in the middle that I thought said it all.
I wore it with pride, broadcasting my belief in equality and my abhorrence of racism. For that, Barr targeted me.
Barr reached yet another new low last week in insisting that there is no systemic racism in policing. As our nation cries out for racial justice, riveted on the pervasive discriminatory practices and culture of law enforcement, Barr can not even acknowledge the problem. Instead, he bared his racist soul, denying what is plain for all to see in one cruel cold-hearted dog whistle to the core of Trumps base. It is incomprehensibly tragic that the 15-year old who hated me for believing in equality is now in charge of enforcing racial justice. He hasnt changed a bit.